Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir

PREFACE

I HAVE SPENT MUCH of my life listening. During interviews people have described to me in painful psychological detail their encounters with some of the defining acts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong I listened to Chinese and Westerners who had been subjected to Chinese Communist thought reform, in Hiroshima to Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb, in New York City (and New Haven, Connecticut, and Gainesville, Florida) to American veterans of Vietnam who turned against their war, in Germany to Nazi doctors who had participated in a reversal of healing and killing, and in Israel, the United States, and countries throughout Europe to survivors of Auschwitz. I became a witness to the events I studied.

In response to that listening I began to do my share of talking. I developed an early habit of dictating notes closely describing not only the content of each interview or conversation but my own impressions, emotions, and associations. I called this a research diary, but the notes also became a bumpy narrative of my life as a researcher and activist, and of the extraordinary environments in which I have found myself. I have extended that talking into sustained conversations over years and decades with friends and partners in dialogue. And all of my books and articles have taken shape through dictated, and many redictated, drafts before they reached the typewriter or computer.

This volume is a culmination of nearly six decades of listening and talking. It is in no sense a systematic account of my research studies; I tried to provide such accounts in earlier books. Rather it is a highly subjective story of my life experience in connection with the work I have done, and of the historical worlds I have inhabited. I’ve tried to record my findings as accurately as possible, but that does not mean I have been neutral. I’ve been moved by victimized people I encountered and have spoken out publicly against the forces responsible for their suffering. That identification with survivors of cruel events has in fact been a major source of my social activism. After what I had heard and seen, it became quite natural—indeed urgent—for me to take stands against mind control, nuclear weapons, American warmaking, and Nazi-like cruelty and genocide. To be sure, I’ve brought to the work such inclinations toward protest, but these were deepened and clarified in ways that did not permit me to stay silent. I felt that I had gained special knowledge of the impact of these abuses, which could inform my witness, and that I was able to make use of my unusual vantage point to become an advocate for peaceful paths to justice and political decency. My always imperfect balance between scholarship and activism is a central theme of this volume.

There has always been something logical about my writing a memoir. Friends have often suggested it, pointing to work I have done in various places on issues that matter and to encounters and friendships with compelling people along the way. I considered the idea, but for years resisted it. It’s not that I haven’t been introspective—in addition to all those self-examining notes, I’ve long kept records of my dreams and associations to them. But as a person used to plunging ahead into new projects, I feared that a memoir would immerse me too much in the past. Also, as one who wrote mainly about other people, I did not quite know how to proceed with a book mainly about myself. I had to find a way to do two things: to simultaneously look back to the past and ahead to the future, and to locate myself in settings and ideas that had significance of a larger kind. As every writer discovers, structure is key. Mine for this volume should have been obvious, but it took me some years to come to it. I finally realized that the foundation I needed lay in the four most significant events I had confronted: Chinese thought reform, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, and the behavior of Nazi doctors; and that all of these had immediate importance for present national and world dilemmas. With that realization, I could first imagine the project, and then embrace it.

It helped me a lot that I did not have to depend entirely on my memory. That was because of the collection of my papers at the New York Public Library. Organized by its curator, Melanie Yolles, in more orderly fashion than I ever could have, the collection gave me marvelous access to hundreds of thousands of pages of research interviews, personal notes, and pre-computer correspondence. I made many all-day visits to the manuscript room in the 42nd St. branch, which I came to greatly appreciate for its aura combining contemporary efficiency (helpful, businesslike responses to requests) and antiquated quietude (no conversations, no cell phones, nothing but a smattering of earnest seekers working at quaintly old-fashioned but fully serviceable desks and lights). There I felt myself to be a medieval monk poring through ancient texts and folios—only in this case the texts and folios consisted mainly of my own words and actions.

What I read mostly felt familiar, though frequently deviating quite a bit from my memory—since memory is a rendering of the past from the perspective of the present. And on occasion I could be quite surprised by finding experiences of which I had absolutely no recollection. I could even at times feel myself to recover whole segments of my life that had been lost. Without that library collection, I’m not sure I could have embarked on the memoir at all. It provided me with an anchor in my own recorded historical actuality. Yet I also learned as I proceeded that I could not allow myself to be buried under the weight of those pages; and that the memoir, like all writing and thinking, had to be actively re-imagined from that factual anchor.

I look back at the man (and sometimes boy) of the past, and at the world of that time, through the prism of the man I am now, living in contemporary history. When a friend asked me which self I was writing about, my answer was that I could in no way avoid addressing both of them at the same time. Doing that has changed me, though I’m not sure exactly how. It has something to do with putting me in touch with fragments of my self, associated with different environments and historical moments, which have, however haphazardly, found some continuity and managed to blend. That in turn has given me an intimate awareness of the flow of personal and social change.

I do not consider these struggles to be what Freud called self-analysis (in connection with his pursuit of psychoanalytic insight into his own life). I see it instead as an effort to connect my developing understanding of extreme events with my own feelings and behavior—that is, to connect self and evolving doctrine. (I believe Freud was doing much the same in seeking from his own early life experience corroboration for his theory of childhood sexuality as the source of neurosis). The process can be convoluted, and one requires a certain amount of gallows humor concerning the world’s absurdities and one’s own contradictions. But that connection between self and doctrine is crucial both to the theorist who seeks conviction about his theories, and to the activist who wishes to behave honorably in the face of what he has learned.

Age has also mattered. I began the volume at close to eighty, knowing that I had limited time and energy to complete it. At issue has been not so much Buber’s famous, still profound question, If not now, when? as whether or not to mobilize my finite resources for this particular project. The present volume is my way of answering that question.

So I have structured the book around those four crucial research studies, along with a fifth section on their reverberations in me and in others, and on my special relation to Wellfleet and the forty-five years of Wellfleet meetings I have convened on psychology and history. In each of these sections I have included especially memorable experiences in the research, as well as my more general intellectual struggles of the time. From my Hong Kong work on thought reform there is the searing image of a Dutch priest reduced to believing in his own false confession of espionage, but also at that time my discovery of mentors (especially Erik Erikson and David Riesman) and experience of the excitement of intellectual friendships. From my Hiroshima work I retain a life-changing image of the survivor who looked out at his former city to discover that Hiroshima had disappeared, a memory that contributed directly to my antinuclear passions, particularly in the physicians’ movement.

Antiwar veterans brought me devastating images of the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, which I could incorporate into my public testimony about atrocity-producing situations, and ultimately into civil disobedience in opposing the war.

For my German section I retained images of Auschwitz as a separate planet, from the perpetrators, Nazi doctors, and survivor-victims, Jewish and Polish; I also describe powerful friendships with people who have given much of their lives to exposing truths about Nazism and genocide, including Jewish American scholars such as Raul Hilberg as well as many non-Jewish Germans, notably Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. And in the last section, interspersed with the Wellfleet ambiance, is my longstanding dialogue and friendship with Norman Mailer.

This is a highly personal book, but not one mainly concerned with intimate family ties. To be sure, my parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren all make appearances, and my wife BJ shares with me almost the entire journey. But even when family members remain in the background they are very much present in the interstices of my being. My narrative remains personal in a different way, having to do with my intellectual and ethical struggles—where they have taken me and where they still lead.

Part One

Discovering the World—and its Totalism

1

The Decision

IN LATE APRIL of 1954, when I was twenty-eight years old, I took a long walk through the streets of Kowloon, a crowded part of Hong Kong. Those streets were teeming with people as I passed shops of every kind, from small noodle stands to elegant dress stores with European mannequins, along with endless houses and small factories. My mind was on neither the people nor the buildings. I was painfully preoccupied with the important life decision I was trying to make.

My wife, BJ, and I had been living in Hong Kong for about three months, staying in a comfortable bohemian garret room we had negotiated at the then modest family-oriented Miramar Hotel. I had been interviewing both Westerners and Chinese who had been subjected on the Mainland to a remarkable process called thought reform. The reformers employed considerable coercion, sometimes violence, but also powerful exhortation on behalf of a new Chinese dawn, seeking to bring the beliefs and worldviews of participants into accord with those of the triumphant Communist regime. I could observe that thought reform was by no means a casual undertaking but rather a systematic and widespread program that penetrated deeply into people’s psyches and raised larger questions about the mind’s vulnerability to manipulation and coerced change.

Hong Kong was supposed to be just the second stop on a leisurely round-the-world trip, which began in Japan, where I had arranged to be discharged from the military after two years of service as an Air Force psychiatrist. But that trip was interrupted by interviews arranged by people I met in Hong Kong with Western missionaries and teachers, and Chinese students and intellectuals who had been put through thought reform, and by my deep absorption in—one could say obsession with— those interviews. But now I was getting anxious. Our money was running out, and I was experiencing a sense of duty, a feeling of necessity to return to America for the serious business of psychoanalytic training and pursuit of my psychiatric career in general—that is, to get back to the structures of real life. I was very reluctant to leave Hong Kong but could not seem to imagine staying. BJ was game either way. Hence my solitary walk.

As I circled ever more widely from the hotel, walking away from the harbor to places that seemed quieter and a little less populated, I found myself coming to a decision. I rushed back to make my announcement to BJ. We had to leave and make our way home. It was impossible to stay.

Yet somehow the next morning, I was, with BJ’s help, working on an application for a research grant to remain in Hong Kong. You did not make the decision—the decision made you is the way a friend put it when I told him the story. My profound inner desire was to stay, but I could not quite accept that desire—could not see myself as one who would do so—because it seemed to be a kind of transgression, a rejection of an expected career and a safer life.

It was just a decade after the end of World War II, and American psychiatry had been reenergized by the influence of psychoanalysis and had become an admired and lucrative profession. I had never doubted that I would be part of this surge, that I would combine psychiatric practice with a certain amount of related teaching and research. Remaining indefinitely half a world removed in a British colony did not seem to be a way to do that. At the same time I was not only fascinated with the interviews themselves but drawn to the larger historical world in which I found myself. I was having lively discussions with knowledgeable American, European, and Chinese scholars, journalists, and diplomats. These China watchers conveyed to me their insights on the appeal and excesses of the Communist revolution, and were in turn eager to hear my impressions, as a psychiatrist, of a thought reform process they found psychologically confusing. It was a heady immersion into immediate historical forces, and I wanted to sustain that immersion. I was aware of Hong Kong’s antiquated status as a British colony in which there was limited contact between Europeans and the predominantly Chinese population. But I was nonetheless drawn to the place with its ferries and hills and relationship to the surrounding sea, as well as its partial access to the often mysterious events occurring during the early years of Chinese Communist governance of Mainland China. That partial access had special importance at a time when the United States did not recognize Communist China and there was little communication between the two nations.

My intellectual excitement about thought reform was accompanied by a sense of adventure, of plunging into realms that seemed uncharted. But I was also frightened by that impulse. It seemed dangerous, bound up with too great a risk, which is why I went through the motions of rejecting my desire to stay. BJ’s support did much to help me overcome my anxiety. She never looked upon staying in Hong Kong as a transgression.

A Military Gift

How I came to be doing those interviews in Hong Kong is a bit of a story and has much to do with the military. I sometimes say that the military liberated me from a conventional life and I have never shown it much gratitude. Soon after the onset of the Korean War in June 1950, America instituted a special draft of doctors, as they were in short supply in the military. My draft board allowed me no time beyond my completion of the second year of my psychiatric residency at the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York, in June 1951. I was told that I had the choice of either enlisting in one of the services as a medical officer or being drafted into the Army as a private. I chose the Air Force for my medical enlistment for reasons I cannot completely recall, but which I believe had to do with having relatively more freedom in that service and a greater likelihood of working only in psychiatry. In any case, I made my one trip to the Pentagon, where I maneuvered through its labyrinthine ramps and archways to take and pass my physical examination.

Just a few months before my 1951 enlistment, I fell in love and began for the first time to think of my future as including another person. BJ was working in television after having graduated from Barnard College as an English major, and was beginning to write. We met in a casual New York fashion—on a double-blind date in which each of us had been fixed up with someone else. BJ and I were quickly drawn to one another and, during the period between my enlistment and my first military assignment, we traveled together through France and Italy. That assignment was to a hospital at Westover Air Force Base, not far from Springfield, Massachusetts. There were four other psychiatrists in that hospital unit, all at about my level but a few years older, the one who arrived first serving as chief. The work was ordinary but valuable for me in gaining experience beyond the limited world of residency training. And BJ and I were able to stay together near the base in a little cabin on a small pond (all part of a dingy motel that seemed perfect for us), where she wrote children’s stories and plays.

Our small idyll was rudely interrupted by a requisition for a psychiatrist to be sent overseas. The choice of which one had to be made by our then chief, Benson Snyder, who was to become a leading Boston psychoanalyst and teacher, and is still a good friend. Ben chose me because I was the youngest, the lowest in seniority (as the last to arrive), and the only one who was not married. My first reaction was resentment: I was happy the way things were, and did not want to be sent anywhere. Over the years Ben and I have joked about how that initial resentment gave way to deep gratitude to him for making a choice that so influenced my life. As I remember, I was permitted to make a request as to where I wished to be sent, and rather conventionally asked for Paris, but was hardly surprised when the orders came through for Tokyo. Now BJ and I were faced with our own choices. We were intent on staying together. So we married, in early 1952, in Cincinnati, which was her hometown, and our nervous three-day honeymoon consisted mainly of travel arrangements (to northern California, where I was to report for my flight to Japan) and other preparations for my overseas service. At the time I was much more upset by our separation than by any thought of physical danger ahead.

We were not separated for long, as she arranged to travel to Tokyo as a correspondent accredited to two American magazines, as opposed to enduring a wait of about a year or so, which was standard for a wife joining her officer husband in Japan. But our reunion was all too brief, as the Air Force in its wisdom sent me immediately to Korea—not as punishment for my wife’s appearing in this unconventional way, but to make clear that her doing so would not deter them from their prior military planning. I then served for six months as command psychiatrist with the Fifth Air Force at Taegu, a medium-sized city in South Korea well behind the lines. What was remarkable was that I was the only Air Force psychiatrist in all of Korea—there were, of course, many Army psychiatrists, but in the Air Force only me. The Air Force would fly me to other bases to evaluate anyone who seemed to be in psychiatric trouble. Often as not the problem would consist of a kitchen worker threatening another with a knife, or an airman becoming withdrawn or depressed and unable to perform his duty. For more serious problems—for instance, pilots who refused to fly—referral would usually be made to regular Air Force medical officers (not necessarily psychiatrists), those with career commitments to the service who did flying time of their own. Those regular officers, committed as they were to command, would do everything possible to keep such pilots at duty. Reservists like myself, by contrast, were more likely to give precedence to individual psychological needs and to send such pilots back to the States for treatment.

During my six months as a flying psychiatrist in Korea, BJ settled into Tokyo, moving in with a Japanese family and continuing her writing, which now included feature stories for English-language Japanese newspapers. She also befriended a number of Japanese university students and with them formed the English-language East–West discussion group, which provides perhaps the most amazing statistic of this volume in that it continues to meet fifty-eight years later. We could observe how students from Tokyo University who spoke so ardently of rebellious democratic principles or Marxist views of history evolved into leading Japanese diplomats or participants in the Japanese economic miracle (and subsequent decline).

These were the last days of the American occupation, and I had no trouble telephoning BJ almost every night from Korea. More than that, I could hitch rides on planes heading from Taegu to various Japanese cities. I would call to arrange a romantic rendezvous at, say, an inn in Kyoto or a hotel in Tokyo or Nagoya. (We would later advise friends that one of the two secrets to a long marriage was to live in separate cities during the first six months. [The second secret was to subscribe to two copies of The New York Times].) But despite those exciting reunions, I was happy to be sent back to Japan, where we could rent a Japanese-style house in the middle of rice paddies between the base at Tachikawa, to which I was assigned, and the Tokyo metropolis. We managed to spend a great deal of time in Tokyo, and my involvement with the city was furthered when I was asked to set up an outpatient clinic to handle general problems of Air Force personnel there, an opportunity that I happily embraced.

For me discovering Japan meant discovering the world. It was partly a matter of encountering a culture so different from my own, and partly the remarkable experience of the Japanese in undergoing the pain, confusion, and, for some, liberation associated with war, defeat, and occupation. Through the minds of the university students—only later did I realize that they were just five or six years younger than I was—I got a powerful sense of the country’s shifting historical currents, and the degree to which young people especially were involved in struggles with change. Those struggles encompassed everything in Japan, whether involving cultural tradition, experience in families, or political beliefs and policies. Through BJ’s work we also met a number of writers, painters, and potters who taught me much about the interweaving of creative work and social upheaval. And I began what was to be my longest Japanese friendship, with Takeo Doi, then a young psychiatrist at Tokyo University, who did some of his training in the United States.

For more than a half century, Takeo and I were to share idiosyncratic ideas about how individual people in both Japan and the United States combined deep conflict with innovation and achievement. We also found ways to help one another psychologically in our complicated personal journeys through the two cultures (including his opposition to his American psychoanalyst’s pressure to undergo the kind of character change that would enable him to adapt more easily to Western professional practice). Takeo was to become a leading figure in Japanese psychiatry, noted for his nuanced work on the psychology of dependency in the mother–child relationship and throughout the society, work which had much relevance for Western cultural experience as well. Takeo was to deepen my understanding of everything I experienced in Japan, whether in connection with young people, Hiroshima survivors, or members of Aum Shinrikyo—always doing so with a kind of sardonic humor that made me aware that there was still much more to learn.

What I observed during those early days in Japan led to my preoccupation with the interplay of individual lives with the larger fluctuations of history, a theme I came to refer to as individual psychology and historical change. In a couple of letters to friends I mentioned a possible future project of doing a study of Japanese youth as exemplars of that theme, so it is conceivable that I would have returned to Japan for some such project, even if I had not been swept up by what happened next.

During the summer of 1953, long after I was back in Japan, BJ finally managed to obtain the credentials for work as a correspondent in Korea that she had been seeking during the time I was there. She went there anyway and did some writing about events surrounding the armistice that brought an end to the war. It had been both a civil war and a military activation of the Cold War, expanded all too broadly by President Truman and his secretary of state Dean Acheson. Most Americans, myself included, were unaware of its dimensions of killing and dying, which were to rival those of the later Vietnam War. By the time I and BJ reached that country, early Communist victories had been reversed by a MacArthur-led surge, which had then been turned back by the intervention of Chinese volunteers, culminating in a protracted stalemate at Panmunjom and the 38th Parallel.

In late August of 1953, during one of our telephone calls (now she was on the Korean end, calling me in Japan), she spoke excitedly about what was called Operation Big Switch, the repatriation of American prisoners of war from Chinese Communist captivity in North Korea. She said that there were beginning observations and reports about the American soldiers having been subjected to a psychological process that left them confused and sometimes expressing the views of their former Communist enemies, and that psychiatrists were interviewing them upon their return. We agreed that it would be very interesting for me if I could arrange to be assigned to the project. I immediately contacted Colonel Donald Peterson, the medical officer in charge of all psychiatric personnel in the Far East. He had heard me discuss some of my impressions of the conflicts of the few combat pilots I had examined, was well disposed toward my work, and quickly arranged the assignment for me.

I joined the team of psychiatrists interviewing the returning men at the South Korean port city of Inchon, in Panmunjom, the no-man’s land separating North and South Korea, where the men had been received. But I did most of my interviewing on a troop ship called the General Pope, joining the repatriated men on a fifteen-day voyage from Inchon to San Francisco. This sea voyage was useful to the men as an interlude between their hypercontrolled prisoner-of-war experience and the demands of the American environment to which they were returning. Like other psychiatrists on board, I conducted individual interviews with them—ninety in all—to determine their mental status and to decide whether any form of therapy was indicated.

The men had been held in prisoner-of-war camps administered by the Chinese and subjected there to a process their captors called thought reform. There had been sensationalized accounts of brainwashing in China itself, but little was known about the actual workings of thought reform. I could identify its two basic components as confession-extraction and reeducation. The confessions were produced by pressures, threats, and actual deprivations, which in the extreme conditions of the camps could be life-threatening. Confessions were inseparable from coercive forms of group study, involving eight to twelve or more POWs, in which Chinese mentors put forward their Communist interpretation of the American war against the people of Korea and China, and of the capitalistic worldview that brought on the war. The reeducation process included constant criticism and self-criticism in the service of the demanded change in POWs’ personal attitudes and beliefs; and the self-examination could apply to not just these large issues but the smallest everyday misdemeanor. Consider the document, labeled Confession and Self-Criticism, given me by one of the men I interviewed on the ship, containing what he wrote while in the camp:

This morning after breakfast my plat leader came into my quarters and told me to clean up the yard. I saw that the plat leader was right in telling me to clean up the yard because it is his duty to see that it gets done. Instead of obeying my superior, I not only forgot about my work but another hour later I was caught in another co. I realize that if this were not the Chinese people’s Volunteers, if this were a Japanese or German POW camp, I would surely be punished to a terrible degree, maybe even to death. Because of the Chinese people’s Lenient Policy in the care of POWs my punishment for this crime will be very light. I promise and guarantee that in the future I will try my very best to obey all the rules and regulations set forth by the Chinese people’s Volunteers. If in the future I do make any more mistakes I will come to the Chinese and confess all my crimes. When I leave here, I will go and tell my plat leader how sorry I am that my disobedience has caused so much ill feelings among the Chinese and myself. I will then complete the job the plat leader assigned me to.

Signed

[name and serial number]

Those seen as resistive to the process were labeled by the Chinese as reactionaries and threatened with permanent incarceration or death, while those who were more responsive were considered progressives and sometimes given slight improvements in their treatment in ways that could contribute to survival. A handful was sufficiently affected by the reeducation to decide to remain with their captors by going back with them to Communist China.

I conducted twelve group therapy sessions on the voyage, which gave many of the men an opportunity to share feelings about their experiences and their former captors in ways that they could not permit themselves to do within the accusatory and fearful atmosphere of their imprisonment. Just as, during their incarceration, they had got through their experience by partial withdrawal—or as they put it, playing it cool or putting my mind in neutral—they continued to use these dissociative defenses on the ship and undoubtedly in their lives well beyond that voyage. Their openness was further constrained by the military setting, in which the men had to be concerned about being punished anew for something they did back there or said now.

Overall, I found the men to be deeply confused, still showing considerable apathy and withdrawal. They could, occasionally and sometimes inadvertently, express Communist views, but mostly they were resentful toward the Chinese for the pain they had caused, and in some that resentment could extend to the American military for having put them in that situation and for not showing enough understanding of their ordeal. As I later wrote, The average repatriate [on arriving at Inchon] was dazed, lacked spontaneity, spoke in a dull, monotonous tone [and]… at the same time was tense, restless, clearly suspicious of his new surroundings. Nor did most of the men show great enthusiasm at arriving in San Francisco or being greeted there by family members or former military buddies. Their eyes often expressed what was called a thousand-mile stare.

I had mixed feelings about those interviews and group sessions. I felt sympathy for the men and was concerned that our reports might not be confined to appropriate medical channels and be used for disciplinary purposes. So I limited my comments to psychological observations. At the same time I was deeply interested in the process of thought reform and its being applied across the board to American prisoners of war. It was clear that the reeducation had mixed results and that there had been much self-protective playacting and withdrawal on the part of the men. Still, the Chinese had managed, at least temporarily, to gain considerable control over the minds of many of the POWs. And even the absurd lengths to which they would go in producing childlike confessions suggested the commitment of the reformers to their project. I was frustrated, however, by the military setting and the relatively superficial quality of the interviews and group therapy I had been able to conduct. I wanted to learn more about the thought reform process.

I flew back to Tokyo, where BJ awaited me. But we did not leave Japan for almost another three months, as I had decided to write an article for a psychiatric journal on my experiences with the repatriated American soldiers. The paper that resulted, Home by Ship: Reaction Patterns of American Prisoners of War Repatriated from North Korea, was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in April 1954. It was of no great brilliance, but was probably the first article to be published on the subject of thought reform in a scholarly journal. I had stayed to write it because the experience had been important to me, and I wanted to record it. I also wanted to place myself somewhere on the map of my profession—to move ahead and be noticed. So began a pattern of feeling impelled to write something, getting well behind schedule, but staying put to see it through. I had no idea of what I was getting into.

The Vortex

As I immersed myself in the Hong Kong interviews, I realized that the thought reform to which the POWs had been exposed was an export version. Now I was hearing about a much more profound and systematic process, as applied on the Chinese Mainland. I was fascinated by it on two levels. The first was the nitty-gritty experience I would study with each Chinese or Western person I talked to, which led immediately to fundamental psychological questions about ways in which minds can be manipulated and changed, and about capacities to resist such manipulation. Also involved were important distinctions between coercive and therapeutic approaches to bringing about change. These questions were at the heart of my profession and have significance for the way we live in general. But there was another level to thought reform: its visionary or transcendent characteristic, the specter of hundreds of millions of Chinese—in their neighborhoods, schools, and places of work—caught up in a compulsory movement of purification and renewal. What did it mean for such an extreme ethos to dominate an entire vast society?

Intellectuals and students experienced the quintessential version of thought reform. It was the version that the Chinese Communists evolved over decades and that served as a major tool, a psychological underpinning, of their entire revolution. Then, in late 1951, two years after their takeover, and three years prior to my study, the regime mounted a national thought reform campaign aimed especially at intellectuals, creating what an observer called one of the most spectacular events in human history [in which] tens of thousands of intellectuals… [were] brought to their knees, accusing themselves relentlessly at tens of thousands of meetings and in tens of millions of written words.

The overall narrative was always the same: the old society in China, or any noncommunist state anywhere, was evil and corrupt because of the domination of the exploiting classes—landowners and capitalists and bourgeoisie—and everyone exposed to such a society retains evil remnants or ideological poisons, which must be eliminated to create a truly revolutionary society. In effect, what had to be destroyed was all mental life separate from or prior to the revolution, to be replaced by truly revolutionary mental life. Later I came to view the process as an apocalyptic cleansing of all the past—a psychological apocalypticism in which all prior products of the human mind had to give way to a new collective mind-set that was pure, perfect, and eternal. I was drawn into this vortex, not as a participant but as a critical explorer entering strange and unfamiliar territory.

The Things I Carried

What did I bring to my study of thought reform? Professionally, I was caught up in the exciting post–World War II American psychoanalytic honeymoon period. Psychoanalysis underwent considerable expansion after both world wars because it seemed to offer, as other schools of thought did not, understanding about the experience of soldiers in combat. But the American embrace of psychoanalysis during the decades after World War II was unique. It had much to do with the sanctuary our country could offer refugee European practitioners. But it also had to do with a deep-seated American enthusiasm about the possibilities for reshaping the self, given our history of people creating new lives through changing frontiers and through emigration from the old world. I had read a certain amount of Freud in college and medical school. And during my psychiatric residency I began to take in the writings of contending schools within psychoanalysis. These included classical practitioners who held closely to Freud, ego psychologists who sought to diminish the focus on instinct or drive by emphasizing the formation of the individual self or ego, and neo-Freudians who moved further from the master in stressing cultural influences and collective behavior. But I was conflicted about my reactions to psychoanalysis. On the one hand I considered it one of the great revolutions of modern thought. On the other, I felt appalled by its frequently dogmatic tendencies, especially among its classical exponents, but also by the agitated hairsplitting among advocates of the various schools. And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.

I struggled with this ambivalence toward psychoanalysis during my two years of psychiatric residency training. My best teachers by far were psychoanalysts, and I learned a lot from them about what we called dynamic psychiatry, which emphasized such basic psychoanalytic principles as unconscious motivation and the importance of childhood development. But I felt I always had to sort out what they said and differentiate between real insights and a quick tendency to invoke traditional concepts (such as the Oedipus complex) to explain just about everything. I engaged in extensive conversations with other residents who had similar doubts, and struggled to translate psychoanalytic jargon into ordinary language. I had neither the experience nor the knowledge to provide much alternative theory. But I had a certain critical sensibility that included a strong aversion to dogma of any kind, especially that related to all-or-none beliefs and emotions, an early manifestation of what I would later call an allergy to totalism.

There was a certain parallel in my evolving political convictions. My parents and their friends were liberal Democrats, and I can remember my excitement when, at the age of six in 1932, my first-grade teacher announced that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected president. My family, and everyone else around me, had made it clear that this was a big moment. Through my childhood we all held strongly to Rooseveltian liberalism, which, as my father made clear, was both good for the Jews and a form of larger social justice. At the same time, I now realize, my parents had a don’t rock the boat mentality. Their parents had come to this country, in the late nineteenth century, fleeing their shtetl outside of Minsk to escape pogroms and avoid service in the czarist army. My mother and father, born in this country, were grateful for its sanctuary, and were intent on being fully American. That meant distancing themselves not only from the old country (which they had been told much about though never had seen) but also from the poverty they had seen too much of throughout their childhoods in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. While exposed to Yiddish in their families even before English, they would use it only when they did not want my sister and me to understand what they were saying.

I became aware early that Jews were always vulnerable to abuse, especially with the emergence of the Nazis, and I’m sure I was not free of more searing unconscious terror, having to do with persecutions, transmitted over Jewish generations. I had occasional brushes with Italian or Irish kids who came from outside our middle-class Jewish neighborhood in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and made anti-Semitic remarks. But I experienced our neighborhood as a protective environment and that gave me a sense of belonging. It provided our mostly Jewish friends, and also Ben and Sol’s Delicatessen, where we went at least once a week for lox and bagels and corned beef and pastrami sandwiches—in no way superior to other nearby Jewish delicatessens but somehow our Jewish delicatessen.

I also had a touch of what a friend called a Jewish Huck Finn childhood, which mostly had to do with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field, where they played, and became for me and a number of friends a field of dreams. On frequent game day afternoons a few of us would hang around outside the stadium and then, during the late innings, sneak in—run wildly past the turnstiles and into the aisles opening up on the glorious vista of the large baseball diamond, and quickly find seats to settle into for the remainder of the game. We were never stopped or caught, and only much later did I realize that it was the policy of the guards to turn the other check and let the kids in with only an inning or two remaining. We, mostly well-behaved middle-class youngsters, could have the satisfaction of a successful transgression.

Sports in general, along with my studies, seemed to dominate my childhood. My father did not play at them much himself—though he was proud of having been student manager of the basketball team while an undergraduate at the City College of New York—but encouraged me to do so. I became a passable athlete, playing endlessly at stickball, baseball, football, basketball, and tennis—whether in the Brooklyn streets, a schoolyard, a local park, or the Jewish summer camp I attended from the ages of six to fifteen. I can remember thinking as a child that adult life must be very boring because it did not seem to include spending much time playing a game with a ball. I believe there was a kind of tandem between my passion for sports and my energy toward my studies. I was always a conscientious student and had a strong early interest in mathematics and history. My father’s life experience was influential here as one of many bright Jewish kids from poor families guided by sympathetic teachers to the elite Townsend Harris Hall high school as a path to free higher education at City College. He delighted in telling me how many of the kids he grew up with became obscure stand-up comics or members of the Jewish Murder, Inc., with the implication that only education had saved him from such a fate.

But I had other family exposure of a very different kind, in the form of my maternal grandparents’ version of Orthodox Judaism. It seemed to consist of suffocating rules about not just what one could eat and the sets of dishes to be used, but concerning just about every form of behavior, along with agitated intolerance for anyone who did not follow these rules. On those occasions that I was coerced into going to my grandparents’ synagogue, everything was chanted in a language I could not understand, nor was there ever any attempt to explain to me the purpose or meaning of any ritual or prayer. I remember one strange incident that came to signify that kind of religion for me. A man selling Christmas trinkets managed somehow to gain entry into my grandparents’ apartment. After he was angrily shown the door, my grandmother spent what seemed to be hours blessing and purifying the contaminated areas of the floor on which he had trodden, and attached booties to her own shoes to avoid stepping herself in those areas. Yet she and her husband were kind and modest people who happened to be caught up in an absolutized form of religion. My parents broke away from such religious practice, my mother with a certain nostalgia for Jewish ritual, and my father with an articulated (though not to the grandparents) disdain that legitimated my own discomfort. I now see that version of Orthodox Judaism as a childhood encounter with what I would later know as totalism.

I was just sixteen years old when I entered Cornell University in 1942, having been permitted to skip grades in primary school (a common practice then in relation to good students with ambitious parents), and having attended a rapid-advance junior high school program (gaining another year). At Cornell I was subject to wartime academic acceleration and did the equivalent of three years’ work in two years before entering medical school. I was a biology major, as preparation for medical school, though I was more drawn to courses in history and literature. Eventually I became editorial page director of the Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, and made the university tennis team.

But especially in the beginning I was lonely and somewhat confused, and trying to act older than I was took its toll. I can remember, a few months after I arrived at Cornell, sitting in an Ithaca movie theater close to tears in response to Bing Crosby’s rendering of White Christmas in the film Holiday Inn. My response had little to do with Christmas, which I had never celebrated, or with missing my family (I wanted to be away from it and on my own), but with the sadness and longing in a song that was to become a staple of kitsch popular culture and at the time expressed much of the American mood at the beginning of our involvement in World War II. So I joined a Jewish Greek-letter fraternity, where I could become part of a small community, though often at odds with its atmosphere. I even found a girlfriend and became social chairman—I’m not sure how or why, but I was undoubtedly compensating for my social awkwardness. I have uncomfortable memories of too many evenings of drinking beer together and singing the inane songs college kids sang with their fraternity brothers in those days, but I have to admit now that the experience helped me to get along better with people in general.

My inner conflicts also led to painful failures. One had to do with tennis. As a neophyte reporter on the Daily Sun I was assigned to the tennis team and would sometimes practice on the court with its members. The coach became increasingly gloomy as he saw his team decimated by wartime enlistments. In a less than gracious invitation he said to me one day: Since you’re covering us anyhow, why don’t you just join the team? I was expected to be no more than a reserve, but on one occasion, when several regulars became unavailable, had to be a last-minute replacement in a doubles match. I remember the match going on endlessly in the alien small-town setting of State College, Pennsylvania (where Penn State is located); my abject humiliation as I missed shot after shot; my feelings of guilt toward my partner and the team; and the coach’s plaintive despair as he cried out, "Bob, just try to play half as well as you do in practice!" While I wasn’t a very good player—I would improve with my passion for the game over subsequent years—I think my collapse had to do with my sense of being illegitimate as a member of the team and perhaps, because of my age and immaturity, as a student at Cornell in general.

At the Daily Sun things were better. I advanced from sports to interviews of notable professors to editorials. But that did not mean that I had acquired wisdom. I remember one editorial I wrote in the spring of 1944, toward the end of my stay at Cornell, called How new will the better world be? The title was more catchy than my argument, which was something along the lines that, after winning the war, we could improve the world considerably and prevent future wars by making full use of existing institutions (I’m sure I emphasized the United Nations) rather than by dreams of overturning everything. The editorial was the work of a naïve young man (then turning eighteen) who was a bit carried away by his own rhetoric. I also wrote